Distributed Replicated Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On Debian Lenny

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This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Debian Lenny) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network.
If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (Debian Lenny as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem.
GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86-64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

In this tutorial I use five systems, four servers and a client:

server1.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.100 (server)

server2.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.101 (server)

server3.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.102 (server)

server4.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.103 (server)

client1.example.com: IP address 192.168.0.104 (client)

All five systems should be able to resolve the other systems' hostnames. If this cannot be done through DNS, you should edit the /etc/hosts file so that it looks as follows on all five systems:

should now show the GlusterFS version that you've just compiled (2.0.1 in this case):

server1:/tmp/glusterfs-2.0.1# glusterfs --version
glusterfs 2.0.1 built on May 29 2009 17:23:10
Repository revision: 5c1d9108c1529a1155963cb1911f8870a674ab5b
Copyright (c) 2006-2009 Z RESEARCH Inc. <http://www.zresearch.com>
GlusterFS comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of GlusterFS under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
server1:/tmp/glusterfs-2.0.1#

Now we create the GlusterFS server configuration file /etc/glusterfs/glusterfsd.vol which defines which directory will be exported (/data/export) and what client is allowed to connect (192.168.0.104 = client1.example.com):

Falko Timme is an experienced Linux administrator and founder of Timme Hosting, a leading nginx business hosting company in Germany. He is one of the most active authors on HowtoForge since 2005 and one of the core developers of ISPConfig since 2000. He has also contributed to the O'Reilly book "Linux System Administration".